I am a scholar committed to understanding the relationships between society and the production and governance of the built environment. This means that I investigate how actors and institutions from the public sector, the private sector and civic society interact in planning, designing, governing and inhabiting the built environment, both formally and informally. These basic but foundational ideas explain much of my actions as an educator and researcher.The formal relationships between actors and the built environment I mention above include the development of formal policies and plans that shape our cities and communities. Meanwhile, informal relationships include actions by citizens, private enterprises and sometimes public actors that shape and change the built environment through informal institutions. For Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom, 2015), informal institutions are the “unwritten rules” related to culture, values, informal practices, and inherited worldviews that influence the way by which formal institutions work.An example of informal institution is the Dutch Polder Model, which is characterised by 3 attributes: collective action, consensus seeking and faith in institutions.These “rules” or “ways of doing things” are unwritten, but are firmly anchored in a particular history, culture and attitude towards the world, all of them influenced by how space_ a scarce resource_ has been managed in the Netherlands over the centuries. This informal institution influences the way by which decisions are negotiated, plans and policies are shaped and ultimately how society deals with the management, planning and design of space and resources in the country.I am trained as an architect and spatial planner with a master’s in planning by the University of São Paulo, a specialisation in urban management tools by the Ecole d’Urbanisme de Paris (former Institut Français d’Urbanisme) and a PhD by TU Delft. I specialise on governance for the built environment and social sustainability, as well as issues of governance in regional planning and design. This includes issues of spatial justice as a crucial dimension of sustainability transitions. I have also published extensively about informal urbanisation in the Global South and I do research on how informal institutions influence and shape planning at the local level. I am a consultant for the Union for the Mediterranean and has recently drafted the UfM Action Plan for Sustainable Urbanisation 2040. https://ufmsecretariat.org/urban-agenda/